The Terminal

"There is nowhere on earth more public than an airport. And there is nowhere lonelier to be hunted in."

The terminal opened out in front of me, bright and modern and deceptively enormous, and for the first time in my life I hated the sight of it.

It was a good building. That was the maddening part of it. They had spent a great deal of money on the place a few years earlier and they had spent it well—walls of glass throwing the South Australian sun back into the room until the whole space glowed with it, and polished floors running away in long clean curves, and a roof held up on steel ribs that arched overhead with all the confidence of something designed by people who were proud of what they were doing. On any other afternoon of my life I would have walked through it and thought, quietly, and without ever saying it out loud to anybody, that is very good work.

And on that afternoon I walked into it and every single one of those decisions was a knife.

Because openness means transparency, and transparency means sightlines, and a sightline is a gift to anybody who is looking for somebody. Every dollar they had spent on making that terminal feel spacious and calm and civilised had gone into making it impossible to hide in. There were no corners. There were no alcoves. There was not one place in the whole of that concourse where a man could stand and not be seen from three directions at once, and I had walked into the middle of it with a bag on my back.

The crowd came round me in a wash—families dragging children and mismatched luggage, business travellers cutting through with their heads up, tourists standing dead in the centre of a walkway with a map open between them. Every one of them entirely inside their own afternoon.

It should have been cover. A crowd is supposed to be cover. Instead it made me feel like the only object in that building with a pulse.

I kept my head down and my shoulders in and I walked at what I hoped was an entirely ordinary pace, and my own backpack shifted against the small of my back with every stride, and the strap was cutting into my shoulder in a way it had not been cutting into it an hour before.

The announcements went on over the top of everything. Boarding calls. A gate change. And then, in that reasonable and faintly bored voice they keep for exactly this, a request that passengers not leave their baggage unattended.

I laughed. Out loud. One short ugly noise, and a man walking the other way turned his head.

Unattended baggage.

Mine was extremely well attended. Mine was pushed in under a rock overhang on a plain of red dust, in a shadow, on a world where the wind took a footprint back inside a minute, and I have never been more careful with anything in my life.

Every sound in that building had gone wrong. Language had stopped being neutral somewhere back in the jet bridge and had become a thing that might at any moment turn sideways and show me what it had actually been saying all along. A woman laughed behind me and I was certain that it was about me. Two men were discussing a delay and I heard the word delayed and my whole chest closed up.

The air smelled of overworked air conditioning and hot metal and the yeasty warmth coming off a fast-food counter, and underneath all of that there was coffee going stale in a pot somewhere, sitting on the back of my tongue like a punishment.

Head down. Keep walking. Do not engage.

I went past a knot of children fighting over a luggage trolley while their mother stood two feet away shouting into a telephone, and one of the boys threw a stuffed koala across the walkway and it bounced off my shin and went skittering away across the floor.

"Sorry," I said. To nobody. Without stopping, because I did not dare stop.

A grown man apologising to a child for having been hit by a toy, and not slowing down to do it.

And then a woman came the other way, moving fast, dark hair, phone at her ear, heels going on the tiles like a metronome.

And my breath went in and stuck there.

Her.

It was not her. It was a woman in a navy suit who was late for something, and she went straight past me and away and never knew that I existed—and I stood there for half a second with my heart coming off its mountings.

And that frightened me a great deal more than she did. Not the woman; the speed of it. The fact that a silhouette, a colour of hair, a way of putting a heel down, could get into me that fast and do that much damage before I had any say in it at all.

My peripheral vision had come up to a pitch I did not know it had. Every head that turned. Every bag that came off a shoulder. Every single person who stopped moving in a crowd where everybody else was still going. I was reading four hundred people at once, badly, continuously, and I could not switch it off.

Was she behind me? Had she got off the aircraft? Had she pushed through that bottleneck at the door while a steward was still apologising to her, and was she back there in that crowd right now, closing?

The thought took hold of me so hard that I very nearly turned round on the spot, and it cost me everything I had not to.

I went under the great arch of the roof with its steel ribs laying long angled shadows across the floor, and all that celebrated openness came down on me from every side, and I felt like a thing crawling about under a glass.

You are imagining it. You are being ridiculous. Get to the exit.

There was an escalator ahead going down to the baggage hall and the ground transport, and I got into the gap between a middle-aged couple who were arguing quietly about parking charges, and let it carry me down.

My hand went onto the rubber rail, and I could not have told anybody whether it was for balance.

Hot concrete came up through the grating as we dropped, and diesel from the taxis outside, and underneath both of them the antiseptic ghost of a floor that somebody had done at four o'clock in the morning.

What if she is already down here?

What if she is waiting at the bottom?

I came off the escalator and folded straight into the traffic without breaking stride, and my eyes went across the whole of that hall—the carousels, the crowds standing round them in semicircles, the drivers holding up bits of cardboard with names on them and looking at their phones instead.

Nothing. No dark ponytail. No denim jacket.

And it did not help me in the slightest, because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I have said that sentence in so many meetings that it has become a joke about me; there is a man in procurement who says it in my voice. And it came back to me on the floor of the Adelaide Airport baggage hall and it was not funny at all.

I got my phone out, and it came up far too bright in my hand.

And there was Josh's face on the screen. A photograph from a camping trip, taken under an ironbark, in a life where neither of us had ever heard of a Portal Key or a Guardian or a woman who could walk out through the side of an aeroplane.

I pressed it before I could think about it.

One ring.

Two.

Three. Four. And every one of them went off inside my skull like something being sounded down into deep water, and every one of them came back with nothing on it.

I went past a newsagent's with the headlines shouting off the racks in black capitals, and I could not focus on one word of any of them. They were shapes. They looked like warnings written in a language nobody had ever taught me.

"Pick up," I said, out loud. "For God's sake, pick up."

My voice came out cracked and frayed and did not sound like mine, and a young woman with a pram steered a wide berth round me and gave me the look that gets given to men who talk to themselves in airports.

And then the ringing stopped.

Not because he answered.

"This is Josh. Leave a message."

And the ordinariness of it went through me like cold water. He had recorded that years ago, in about four seconds, almost certainly while doing something else. He sounded completely relaxed. He sounded like a man with nothing at all the matter.

I killed the call and shoved the phone into my pocket hard enough to jar my elbow, and the strap of my bag came half off my shoulder, and I had to stop dead in the middle of a walkway to put it back—and the movement was sudden, and clumsy, and it was precisely the sort of thing that makes people look up.

And one did. A security officer in his thirties, leaning against a pillar with his arms folded, and his eyes came across that concourse and touched me and went off again.

It was nothing. It was a nothing-look. He had assessed me in about a fifth of a second and filed me under ordinary and gone back to whatever he had been thinking about before I interrupted it.

And my heart very nearly came out of my chest.

I made myself slow down. I made myself breathe on a count. Move like a man with a purpose and not like a man with a problem.

"Bloody brilliant," I said, under my breath, through my teeth.

And it came out with a burr on it.

I heard it happen. That soft rounded West Country thing sitting on the second word, which is my mother's, and which she has never entirely lost in forty years of this country, and which I had not had in my own mouth since I was about nineteen. It is the last thing to go. It only ever surfaces when I am past the end of myself, and it came up out of me on the floor of an airport like an old scar coming up under pressure.

An elderly man came the other way pushing a trolley whose plastic wheels shrieked against the polished floor, and the noise went through me like a wire, and I got out of his way and gripped the strap of my bag and kept going.

And then a great glossy advertising screen came up on my right, polished enough to throw back a reflection, and I saw myself in it before I could look away.

I looked ill.

Gaunt. Grey all round the eyes. My mouth pulled into a line so thin that it had very nearly stopped being a mouth. There was a greasy shine down my temple and along the ridge of my nose, and my hair had dried into whatever shape an airport basin had left it in—and I stood in the middle of that concourse and looked at a stranger.

It was not exhaustion. I know what I look like tired. This was something else, and the nearest I have ever got to it is that I looked like somebody who had been getting away with something and had just about run out of road.

Which I had.

The building pressed in harder with every step. The high windows were letting the sun in across the floor in long hard shafts that had the quality of something being pointed at me. And every ordinary noise in the place had gone sharp—a burst of laughter behind me that made me flinch; the sudden accelerating rumble of a suitcase; a woman sneezing; the clink of cups at a kiosk coming at me like a countdown.

I kept seeing her step out from behind a pillar.

I kept hearing her say my name, which she did not know.

I dug my nails into my palms until it hurt, because pain does not argue and nothing else in that building was telling me the truth. And I made myself count what was actually touching me. The strap on my shoulder. The corner of the phone against my thigh. The burn in my calves from four days of never once properly sitting down.

I did not know what was waiting for me at Elizabeth.

And I knew, with total certainty, that I could not stay inside that building for one more minute.

Up ahead the signage came out of the visual noise—clean lettering, blue and white, the Adelaide Metro logo standing there with all the bureaucratic reassurance of civic infrastructure, which is a thing I have spent my entire career writing specifications for and which I have never in my life been so pleased to see.

Bus to Adelaide City: 17 minutes. Departures every 20.

And underneath everything else, the small reasonable voice I have relied upon my whole working life started up and told me what it has always told me.

You are catastrophising. Look at the evidence. She is very probably still standing in the aisle of that aeroplane having a long and tedious conversation with a flight attendant about airline liability for items left in the cabin. She is filling in a form. Somebody is giving her a pamphlet.

And I could not believe a word of it. Not after that look. Not after the way the confusion had come off her face and been replaced, inside about a second, by something with a decision already made in the middle of it.

She had not asked me a question. She had run a test, and she had watched my hands while she was doing it.

I threw a glance back over my shoulder—casually, I hoped, the way you look back for a person who has stopped at the duty-free.

And my heart came up into my throat, because I saw her.

Or I saw something. A flash of dark hair pulled back hard. A set of shoulders going through a crowd in a way that shoulders do not usually go through a crowd.

And then it was gone. Swallowed whole.

Was it her? Was it another woman with dark hair in a building containing several hundred of them? Was it something my own head had assembled out of a coat and a haircut, because it had been assembling her out of everything for twenty minutes?

And it made no difference. That was what appalled me. The effect on my body was identical either way. It had stopped waiting for my opinion.

I needed somewhere to stop. One minute. Somewhere to stand still and get my breath and think about it properly.

And there was nowhere.

I went through the options as I walked, exactly the way I have gone through options in a hundred workshops, and every single one of them failed on the same criterion.

The lavatories: enclosed, one door, no second exit. A room a man can be cornered in.

The cafés: sitting still, in the open, facing one direction, for as long as it takes to drink something.

The seating areas: rows of bolted chairs with clear sightlines from three sides, which is precisely what they are built for.

There was no sanctuary anywhere in that building. It had not been designed to have one. Every surface reflected and every space was a stage, and the architects had done exactly what they were asked to do and had done it beautifully.

And I came out of a corridor into the main concourse and saw her properly.

She was coming out of the baggage hall.

And she was not looking for a bag any more. She was not distressed, and she was not searching, and there was nothing whatever in the way she was moving that had anything to do with lost property. Her shoulders were square. Her jaw was set. And her eyes were going across that crowd in a flat regular sweep, left to right and back again—and I have read a great many documents for a living, and I know exactly what it looks like when somebody is not reading for content.

She was working a room.

And I stood absolutely still for what cannot have been more than a second, and felt my body stop belonging to me.

Then something considerably older than I am took over, and I went down.

I ducked left and put a family between us—a loud, sunburnt, magnificent family, four generations of them, grandparents arguing about a parking voucher and children screaming and a tower of luggage that had no business standing upright—and I crouched down beside them and started fiddling with a shoelace that was already tied.

My fingers worked away at a knot that was not there.

Do not look up.

Do not look for her.

Do not even think her name. You do not know her name. Do not think it anyway.

Out of the very edge of my vision, warped by the shine coming off the floor, I could see her stop. And look. And assess.

My heart was going hard enough that I could feel it in my back teeth.

And then she moved on. Not far. Not fast. But away.

I came up slowly, keeping the family between us, and slid back into the current, and I did not rush, and I did not turn round.

Behind me I could still hear her voice somewhere—clipped, short, asking somebody something.

And I did not look back, because looking back is how they always get caught.

That was not my line. That was Josh's. He used to watch those things by the boxful, on that enormous television of his with the sound up too loud, and every single time somebody on the screen glanced over their shoulder in a crowd he would jab a finger at it. Rookie error. That's how they always get done.

And I was standing in an airport in Adelaide being hunted by a woman whose name I did not know, operating on a rule of thumb I had picked up from a man who was not answering his phone.

The noise came back up over me like water. A child shrieked and I nearly went over sideways. A woman hauling a case that would not track cut straight across my path and I had to sidestep into a clump of university students photographing one another beside a cardboard kangaroo advertising duty-free Tim Tams.

Every second of it lasted a very long time.

I turned down a side corridor at random, with no plan of any kind, and read the signage as I went, and none of it offered me anything at all. Baggage Reclaim. Domestic Transfers. Arrivals Café.

All of it open. All of it lit. All of it a stage.

And then I looked back, because I could not help it, and because I had lasted about ninety seconds on Josh's rule.

And she was there.

Moving. Cutting through. Going past slower people with an efficiency that had nothing panicked about it anywhere—and that, more than anything else that happened to me in that building, told me what I was actually dealing with.

This was not a woman looking for a bag.

She had done this before.

I veered left into a group of corporate men standing outside a café with their espressos, discussing quarterly figures with the deep contentment of people for whom the universe stops at the edge of a spreadsheet. Their suits and their watches made an accidental wall of expensive anonymity round me for about eight seconds, and I do not believe I have ever been more grateful to a group of strangers in my life.

Keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving.

My legs had gone strange. They were doing what I told them, but they had got heavy, and every stride was costing me something that a stride should not cost.

What was she going to do if she reached me?

Would she shout? Would she point, and say the word thief in a building full of people, and let the security officer with the folded arms do the rest of it for her?

Or would she simply walk up and stand very close and ask me quietly for her bag back?

And what in God's name was I going to say to that?

Because there was no version of the truth available to me. Not one. I put it on another planet is not a sentence that ends well for anybody, and every other thing I could have said was a lie that she would have gone through in about four seconds.

I broke away from the businessmen and cut right, and the overhead signage came up in front of me—Ground Transportation—and I went after it the way a drowning man goes after a rope.

The corridor was quieter. The main concourse fell away behind me and the noise dropped, and I could hear the low throaty murmur of diesel engines coming through the wall, and the floor changed underfoot, and the light came in long and angled through the western windows.

And there it was. The bus station.

Quiet. Cool. Very nearly peaceful. Rows of hard plastic seats in clinical lines. Half a dozen passengers standing about in tired little clusters with their bags at their feet, and the buses out beyond the glass sitting in their bays with the exhaust curling up off them into the heat.

And it should have been the answer.

And I stood in the doorway of it and something opened up in my stomach like a bruise.

Because it was a trap. And I did not feel that. I saw it—laid out in front of me the way I have seen a hundred bad plans laid out in a hundred meeting rooms, as a structure, with the fault sitting in it in plain sight.

A bus station is static. A bus station runs on a timetable. If I went in there I would be sitting on a plastic chair, in a room with one entrance, for anything up to nineteen minutes, in the single most obvious place on the entire site for a man who wants to leave an airport and does not have a car.

She would not have to find me. She would only have to wait.

And I looked at that little room full of tired people and every one of them was wrong. The man reading. The woman with the shopping bags. All of them perfectly innocent and all of them possibly not, and I could not tell, and I was never going to be able to tell.

My hand had actually gone out towards the door.

I took it back as though the thing were hot.

No.

And I turned—too fast, far too fast, the sort of turn that a person notices from thirty metres away—and I went straight back the way I had come, and I did not care in the slightest whether she saw me do it.

The concourse hit me like surf. Noise, and bodies, and the cold blast of the air conditioning going over sweat.

And it made me feel safer.

And I went up that concourse understanding exactly what that meant about me, and it frightened me a great deal more than she did. A crowd of four hundred strangers had become the only thing on this earth I trusted, and stillness had become the enemy, and somewhere between the aircraft door and that bus station I had stopped being a man who was going somewhere and had turned into an animal that had worked out that it must not stop.

Chaos was cover. That was my entire strategy. That was the sum total of everything that eleven years of professional analysis had left me with.

I went through the crowd with my shoulders brushing people, and my eyes going from one exit sign to the next.

Do not stop. Do not think. Do not turn round.

And I turned round.

I could not help it. There is a pressure that arrives at the back of the neck and refuses to be reasoned with, and I had been carrying it for ten minutes, and it finally got bigger than my own instructions to myself.

And she was there.

She came out of the crowd about forty metres behind me, and her eyes came up, and they went straight into mine.

And it closed like a circuit.

There was no ambiguity in it anywhere. There was no possibility whatever that I was mistaken about what I was looking at, because she looked at me and I watched her recognise me—and everything that had been in her face while she was searching a floor went out of it and was replaced by something completely settled.

She had me.

My chest seized. My stride went out from under me.

And then I ran.

There was no point in any of it any longer—no point in the lowered head and the ordinary pace and the careful ambling deniability of a man who is not doing anything wrong. I ran, in an airport, in public, with a bag on my back, at thirty-three years of age, and I have never in my adult life done anything more undignified or more necessary.

I went left and nearly took out an elderly couple with a wall of luggage strapped across two trolleys, and they cried out behind me and it barely registered.

Everything had gone down into a tunnel. That crowd stopped being people. It became terrain—things to go round, things to go through, gaps that were opening and gaps that were closing—and the faces in it smeared away into nothing, and the whole noise of that building went down underneath the sound of my own blood.

She was behind me. I did not have to check. I knew exactly where she was, in the place between my shoulder blades, and she was not going to lose me.

I came round a structural column wide enough to break her line of sight for a second, and my eyes went up to the signage.

TAXI RANK →

And I went for it.

I cut diagonally across the entire flow of that concourse, straight through everybody's line, and I took shoulders and briefcases and a rolling case across the shin, and I left a wake behind me of people saying things.

"Oi! Watch where you're bloody going!"

A man in a charcoal suit glared at me over a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, holding his tablet against his chest like a shield.

"Terribly sorry," I said, and it came out as breath and nothing else, and I was already past him.

More voices behind me. Somebody shouted something I did not catch. A hand came out to stop me and I went under it, and I got round a pram by about four centimetres, and I did not slow down.

I was burning the ground behind me as I went. Every shoulder I hit and every foot I stood on was a person who would remember me, and a description, and a direction. And it was far too late to care about any of it, because there was an EXIT sign glowing at the end of that concourse and it was the only object left in the world.

The automatic doors went apart with a hiss, and January came in at me like an oven door opening.

Dry, and enormous, and abrasive. The heat had my shirt stuck to my back before I had gone three paces.

And I did not care about that either, because there they were: a line of taxis along the kerb, idling, with their windows up and their air conditioning going, sitting there in a row like boats.

And I looked back one last time, which I should not have done, and have never quite stopped doing since.

She was through the doors. She was still coming, and she had not slowed by so much as a footfall—she went between two people without breaking stride at all—and her eyes had not come off me, and there was nothing on her face any longer except the absolute focus of somebody who has stopped hunting and has begun closing.

Run.

And I ran.

"Need a ride somewhere, mate?"

He was leaning against the door of the first cab with his arm slung over the frame—a wide, comfortable man whose company shirt had gone dark under both arms—and he barely lifted his head to say it.

"Yes," I said. "Yes—absolutely—"

I got the rear door open with a wrench that made the hinges complain, and went into that back seat in one movement, and pulled the door shut behind me. The vinyl was cold and slick against a shirt that was soaked all the way through, and the whole car smelled of a pine air freshener swinging from the mirror.

"Where to?" he said, getting in without hurrying himself about it, in the manner of somebody whose day is measured out in fares and has been for a very long time.

He had not looked at me. He had not registered one single thing about the state I was in, and I could have kissed him for it.

"Elizabeth train station."

My hands would not do the seatbelt. I fumbled at the buckle like a man trying to open a puzzle box, and the engine turned over—

And the terminal doors hissed open behind us.

I turned round. I should not have turned round.

She came out into that heat with the sun behind her, and her hair was dark with sweat at the temples, and she stopped on the kerb and swept the whole taxi rank in about two seconds.

And found me.

Our eyes met through the glass, and something in the afternoon stopped.

She did not shout. She did not run. She stood absolutely still on that kerb in the sun and looked at me sitting in the back of a taxi, and her face was made of fury and of something a very great deal colder underneath it—the look of somebody who has got to within four seconds of the thing they needed and has watched it drive away.

And her right hand twitched at her side.

It was nothing. It was a movement so small that a person standing beside her would not have registered it.

And I saw it, and I understood it, and I have never stopped understanding it—because it was not idle. It was a reflex. It was a hand that had begun to do something and had been called back.

She had come within a heartbeat of taking hold of me.

I did not breathe until the car began to move.

We pulled off the kerb and into the line of traffic with the placid efficiency of a system operating exactly as designed, and the distance between us opened up. Ten metres. Thirty. Fifty.

And it did not help at all. Her eyes did not drop and they did not follow the car; they stayed precisely where they were, on me, through the glass, and she got smaller in the window and did not get one inch further away.

It was not over. It was not anywhere near over.

I let my head go back against the seat and my whole body came apart at once, and I sat there with my heart still going and my hands lying in my lap like two objects somebody had left there, and watched the airport slide backwards out of the window. All that lovely glass and steel, glittering in the sun, entirely indifferent to any of it.

The driver chuckled.

"Blimey. She looked like she was about to rip someone's bloody head off."

And I flinched. My whole body went, and I met his eyes in the rear-view mirror for half a second—clear, observant, and entirely uninterested—and then he looked back at the road with the small tired smirk of somebody who has watched the world behave like this several thousand times and has never once been tempted to get involved in any of it.

I tried to smile. It did not work.

"Yes," I said. "Something rather like that, I'm afraid."

And I turned away and put my head against the window, and watched the airport go, and the industrial estates come up, and the whole low brown sprawling north of that city begin to unroll past the glass with the tyres going underneath us.

And the pressure did not come off the back of my neck. It had not gone anywhere. It had simply moved.

She had not stopped. She was not going to stop. Whatever she was, and whoever she was doing it for, she was not going to stand on a kerb watching a taxi leave and then go and get herself a coffee and get on with her afternoon.

Ahead of me was Elizabeth station, and whatever it was that my brother had dragged me into, and a suburb full of faded brick and razor wire and industrial parks quietly going to seed behind their fences.

And behind me was a woman with a face that did not forget anything.

And she was not finished with me.